‘You grow up with footballs. We grow up with kukris’

It’s not often a chap gets to shake a hand that has personally accounted for 31 Japs in the space of one battle. But such was your correspondent’s privilege outside the Royal Courts of Justice this week at the launch of a splendidly righteous case demanding fair and just citizenship rights for Gurkha veterans.

A tearful Joanna Lumley was there — her father fought with the Chindits as a major in the 6th Gurkha Rifles — as was a typically well-mannered crowd of perhaps 300 ex-Gurkhas and their families. But the stars of the show were the two frail, elderly men sitting impassively in wheelchairs, with their un-mistakable crimson-ribboned bronze crosses stuck proudly on their chests. There are currently only ten living recipients of the Victoria Cross and three, it almost goes without saying, are Gurkhas.

Tulbahadur Pun (now 86) won his in June 1944 at the turning-point of the Burma campaign, when almost all his section had been wiped out by Japanese machine guns at the Mogaung railway bridge.